Mt. St. Helens Day Today

Horse Plains Drifter

May 18, 1980

I know a guy who lost a brother in that eruption.

Photo taken by my wife when she was 13 YO.

mike55

WOW

Geri

Nice picture. Moved away fall of 1979, after turning down a job at White River. Thanked the Lord

many times for the prompting of the move.

Thanks for sharing that picture.

Merlinnv12

I was there! I flew down in my Cessna 140 a few hours after the eruption before the airspace was closed down. Got within 10 miles west of it and got some really amazing pictures. Flew back home to Crest Airpark and was telling my dad about it and he talked me into going back down for some more pics. A day I will never forget.

Horse Plains Drifter

Merlinn, that's just too cool! Do you have those pictures in a format that you could post here? I would love to see some of those.

Mr. Perfect

The earthquake that accompanied the eruption cracked the foundation of the house I was living in up in Port Orchard.

Merlinnv12

I could take pics of my old photos and then post them. I will try later today..

Merlinnv12

pulsarnc

Looking forward to the pictures.

Merlinnv12

Here ya go!

This one is interesting. A railroad bridge was wiped out. One rail remained bolted together and the other one broke. You can see it in the lower right corner as it is curved downstream.

The pics above this one are of the logging camp that was destroyed.

I have more pics at another location that we took later when the ”smoke” cleared of Spirit lake and the millions of tree logs floating on it. The trees on the land north of the lake were stripped of their limbs and were all laid down pointing north like toothpicks. I flew down numerous times and took pics of the dome that later developed in the crater.

shootuadeal

Nice pics, both of you.

select-fire

Terrible Day in HIstory

Nanuq907

I was out shooting ground squirrels south of Spokane with my B-I-L when it happened and we saw the dark blanket coming across the sky. Pretty soon it was dark as midnight and ash was falling like a snow storm. It was nuts for months after that.

spasmcreeksrun

i remember that was one of the very few times volcanic ash made it into SC Kansas....county south of us has a 14' thick layer of ash from long ago when volcanoes were active in NE New Mexico......county road dept used to haul it up here to mix in road asphalt....i searched our county and found a small area about a foot thick but with to much overburden to be mined economically....

dreher

I don't remember how many days after the eruption but NW Ohio turned hazy for a couple of weeks. This amazed me that enough ash in the air could travel from the State of Washington to the State of Ohio and cause hazy conditions!!!!

sxsnuf

Had a bird's eye view from our home about 25 miles SW of the mountain. I was most fascinated by the way it created it's own weather systems during the eruption. Hundreds of lightning strikes within the ash plume. We'd been dealing with falling ash for quite a while before the big eruption. The bulk of that went north but we already had several inches on the ground.

toad67

I remember climbing up on the roof and watching it.

Horse Plains Drifter

Thanks for the great pictures, merlinn. I remember, at the time, seeing a similar picture of the Weyerhaeuser logging camp in the Spokesman Review. I still lived in Montana at the time, and it took the ash 12 hours to get there. I remember it was Sunday, and high school graduation. I had graduated the year before, but still had friends who were graduating. Graduation let out just after 8:00 pm. When we came out of the school it was "snowing" ash. It was something to experience, but once in a lifetime is enough.

He Dog

I have a 2" turtle mad from Mt. St. Helen's ash, is that worth worth even a nickle more than I paid for it? If not that old guy died for nothing. He was counting on me making money to augment his retirement.

truthful

We had ash in NE Colorado. Way more than from all the forest fires last summer.

kannoneer

I remember a lot of ash got through air filters and ruined engines.

Brookwood

I remember reading about the energy spent by the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. My memory is faded but it was quite a bit more powerful than both atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

Don McManus

We were blowing ash out the tail end of combines north of Ritzville, WA for years after the eruption. They got 6+ inches in wide swaths of wheat country. The first year we added centrifugal separators to the intakes of all the trucks, and even in August, had to empty them daily.

mohawk600

I was 11 yo when that happened and remember it clearly. I was in Amarillo, TX...........far removed and I don't think we ever got any ash.

rossowmn

I will always carry a grudge against Mt. St. Helens. I was the front-page editor at a mid-sized daily at the time and lived for, even lusted lusted for, stories like the eruption, but I had to take a week of vacation to stay home with my two young kids who had chicken pox. Yup. That's when the mountain blew. So I missed one of the biggest stories of my 12-year front-page job. And don't even get me started on Elvis taking his dive off the toilet seat. Missed that one, too. And to top it off, I used to watch every space shuttle launch and reentry on the newsroom TV, long after the events became routine and no one else paid any attention, because I knew sooner or later something just had to go wrong. But I switched from the newsroom to a teaching job and, sure enough, within a little more than a year, the shuttle exploded. Well, I did get in on the Nixon resignation, the end of the Vietnam conflict, the Reagan shooting, and that nasty Jonestown Kool-Aid thing, so I guess I didn't miss all the big stories.😄

Mr. Perfect

https://forums.gunbroker.com/discussion/comment/11273591#Comment_11273591

What part of Spokane? Didn't know you had ties to this area.